What powers the Brave Search API?
The Brave Search API is powered by Brave Search, a fully independent search engine serving tens of millions of queries per day. Try Brave Search at search.brave.com.
What other web search API options can the Brave Search API compliment or replace?
The Brave Search API can replace several competing options that may have smaller indexes (Tavily or Exa), higher latencies (SerpAPI or Serper), higher pricing (Bing), or more limited access (Google).
It can also serve as a complement to localized API options like Baidu, Naver, Yahoo, and Yandex. The Brave Search API is powered by Brave Search, a completely independent index of the Web, which is tuned to reduce SEO spam and increase quality and recency of results.
Does the Brave Search API surface recent events?
Yes. Brave Search fetches tens of millions of webpages every day, offering extensive coverage of recent events around the world.
Does the Brave Search API follow security and privacy best practices?
Which API plan is right for me?
Whatever your needs, the Brave Search API offers plans to meet them. You can sign up for free and try the API, then choose the right plan once you assess the API’s capabilities. If your company needs a bespoke, large-data solution, contact <searchapi-support@brave.com.>.
What about copyright?
The Brave Search API offers a ranked list of webpages that are publicly available; this list also includes information to support why the webpage is relevant to the query (for instance via query-dependent snippets based on the content of the webpage).
The Brave Search API does not grant any rights to third-party content such as webpages. Customers who access URLs displayed in the Brave Search API must ensure their access to those webpages complies with the copyright terms of the page publishers.
Does Brave Search have its own Web crawler?
Yes, every search engine that has its own index necessarily has its own Web crawler. The Brave Search crawler does not advertise a differentiated user-agent because we must avoid discrimination from websites that allow only Google to crawl them. However, if a domain or page is not crawlable by any search engine (it has a noindex tag), or if it is not crawlable by googlebot, then Brave Search’s bot will not crawl it either.
Brave Search’s crawler is partially powered by information provided by users enrolled in the Web Discovery Project (WDP) option in Brave browser’s search settings, which is an off-by-default (aka opt-in), privacy-preserving system. WDP has multiple mechanisms to prevent Brave from knowing who is contributing what (WDP is also open-source for auditing and inspection by anyone).
What are Schema enriched Web results, Discussions, and Goggles?
Schema enriched Web results
The enriched set of structured data about a webpage that better represents and describes the page. For example, a standard (non-enriched) search result for a Rotten Tomatoes movie review page might contain basic info like URL, title, and synopsis. By contrast, Brave’s schema-enriched result for the same movie page might include this basic info plus a thumbnail image; attributes like release date, director, actors, and rating; and even show review scores. Beyond movies, Brave Search can enrich search results with many types of data, on many kinds of pages, including for videos, articles, products, recipes, software, books, contact information, and more.
Discussions
Discussions is a feature in Brave that is designed to easily serve discussion-based results around searches where there are heavy SEO results. The Brave Search ranking algorithm detects cases where discussion forums would provide an alternative or complementary viewpoint to the organic search results. This is done by computing a “discussion_worthiness” score, which is based on a variety of signals. Learn more.
Goggles
Goggles enable any individual—or community of people—to alter the ranking of Brave Search by using a set of instructions (rules and filters). Anyone can create, apply, or extend a Goggle. Essentially Goggles act as a custom re-ranking on top of the Brave search index. Learn more.